Athanasios Argianas
Arquebuse Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland
Athanasios Argianas, view of the exhibition 'Sing Sideways / Walk From The Middle To The Start / To The End.' Courtesy Arquebuse Gallery, Geneva.
If one were to circumscribe a recent tendency and call it Wunderkammer art — anything with a penchant for unearthing strange and obscure pockets of history and their attendant freakish paraphernalia — London-based Greek artist Athanasios Argianas would come off as a pretty solid shoo-in. Upon first approach, his richly coded sculptures seem to have some occult provenance, while his portraits of friends seem to hum with geometric incantations. But there is much more than meets the eye — or should I say ear? — to what this artist does. In addition to a general obsession with aural phenomena and a Möbius strip idée fixe, Argianas incorporates a broad host of interests and references, ranging from the constructivist aesthetic of Naum Gabo to the systematic composition methods of Raymond Roussel, and the theories of La Monte Young, and more, fusing them together in his idiosyncratic practice. In the artist’s first exhibition at Arquebuse gallery, just as much may be gleaned from three sculptures and a series of five ink and graphite drawings.
Proposal For Reading Consonants as Noise (2008) is the latest incarnation of a two-part sculpture the artist has been working on since 2007. At the centre of each sculpture is an identical amorphous formation — one in black metal, the other in copperleaf — set delicately in a vice-like frame and conspicuously embellished by a metal grasshopper, the whole ensemble sitting aloft a tall and slender tripod. The formations take on a bewitching eloquence the moment you learn that they are volumetric evocations of noise – as imagined by the artist with the help of an oscilloscope reading— that have been cast in metal. Thus animated, their wrinkled surfaces become riddled with crepitations. The enigmatic grasshoppers, respectively placed on vertical and horizontal planes, help invest the two sculptures with the quality of elaborately strange transmitters, as if they were not only communicating with one another, but also functioning as antennae.
The two other sculptures in the show share the circular theme of a calligrammatic poem written by the artist: ‘Sing / Walk Sideways / Walk / Sing From The Middle to the Start / End,’ inspired by La Monte Young’s classic injunction: ‘Draw a straight line and follow it.’ In the wooden, finely crafted One-Sided Sculpture (2008), which replicates the one-sided circularity of the Möbius strip via two imbricated glass panes, the poem figures on two sheets of paper framed in the glass. In Suspended Song Machine (rotator) (2008), the poem is laser-cut into a hollow wooden rhombus that hangs from the centre of three tubes of steel, set atop a tripod. Evocative of some arcane science experiment or esoteric device, this piece likewise brings to mind a transmitter (of its own circular propaganda?). The Möbius strip appears again in Argianas’s series of ink and graphite drawings ‘Partly Obscured Portraits’ (all 2008). In these, arabesque variations of the strip have been superimposed upon profile or three-quarter views of his sitters’ faces, such that their faces are partly obscured. Whether this conjunction is meant to express something on the part of the artist or the sitter remains intriguingly unclear— perhaps it is the byproduct some kind of interpersonal static.
One of the more compelling aspects of Argianas’s practice is how speciously expressive it is. Combining the maniacal enthusiasm of the geek with the demiurgical sang-froid of the dandy, this work is more the product of idiosyncratic interests than any given urgency to artistically emote. It contains a whole universe full of polyphonous speculations and weird, opulent equations, but like any mania, best makes sense when shared, or fully plumbed.
Chris Sharp
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